8. EXPANDED RECOMMENDATIONS
Here we expand upon earlier recommendations by providing case studies that contributed to each recommendation. We have endeavored to summarize lessons learned and to translate those insights into design principles.
This is a draft version of the report (dated October 12, 2017) and will be updated in November.
In short, the recommendations are to:
Clarify the Demand for Participation
1. Optimize for institutional as well as public engagement.
2. Design to achieve the desired goal.
3. Identify who will manage the process.
4. Plan for use, not only solicitation.
Increase the Supply of Public Participants and Information
5. Focus on incentives. Ask “why should a member of the public participate?” and get the answer by talking to and surveying potential users.
6. Explain clearly how to participate.
7. Respect privacy and authenticate users when needed.
8. Communicate the outcome of final decisions.
9. Diversify engagement opportunities and diversify who participates.
Experiment and Improve
10. Test what works and iterate.
Clarify the Demand for Participation
1. Optimize for institutional as well as public engagement.
Crowdlaw designers concentrate on making public input easy for individuals, but to be successful any process also needs to make input useful to institutions. Therefore, consider the needs of the government and public servants and create platforms and processes that account for obligatory and acculturated processes and the staff’s capabilities. This principle does not rule out changes to legal procedures or the hiring of staff with relevant skills to enable public participation, but there must be a workflow that makes the inputs from participation usable.
Facilitate use by government actors
Legislators and staff who understand the potential of crowdlaw for their work, relationship with citizens, and democratic governance may cooperate more with the process. Legislators are key stakeholders and should help to shape the system to complement institutional needs. If their participation remains lacking, despite this knowledge, system administrators can pinpoint possible improvements for making public participation more legislator-friendly.
Parlement & Citoyens’ consultations with citizens are sponsored by a representative inviting citizens to collaborate on a draft legislative proposal. The platform also offers 3–5 stages that are modular for each process. Facilitating the legislator’s involvement on the platform by creating flexibility ensures encourages useful outputs.
Of the two million petitions submitted on the White House’s We the People e-petition platform, not one can be directly tied to a government action, arguably because a petition with no supporting documentation creates, rather than alleviates, work for public officials. Such a platform is not well-designed to enhance decision-making, nor does it create an established process for channeling the right information to the right policymakers.
The platform to public institution pipeline
Whether government uses outputs from the crowdlaw process, and how, is integral to shaping an effective crowdlaw initiative — one that is actually useful! When government guarantees action on process outputs it not only boosts incentives for the public to participate (because they know they will be heard), but it also helps transform outputs into outcomes through the government’s engagement with the public contributions.
vTaiwan participants engage in a series of on-going deliberations with each other and with representatives. If consensus is reached on an idea, the government must either adopt the idea or provide a response as to why the idea is not feasible. Although the platform is independently-run, it coordinates consultations and it has been integrated into an institutional pipeline through the review process.
The City Council of Reykjavik reviews the 12–15 most popular proposals from the Better Reykjavik platform every month. About 13% of the population is on the platform. As of 2016, the City Council had processed over 1,045 ideas.
2. Design to achieve the desired goal.
Public engagement has the potential to foster democratic legitimacy, build social cohesion, increase government accountability, and improve the quality of legislation. An engagement process that asks people how they feel about a draft bill accomplishes a different purpose from a process that asks them, for example, to supply data to inform the crafting of the bill, or that invites them to use cellphones to monitor its implementation. The choice of goal will dictate what constitutes a successful system and the information or action that is sought from the public.
Solicit more and solicit more ideas
Believing that participants can contribute only ideas limits the possibilities for a community’s participatory culture. People can do more! Almost none of the cases reviewed had mechanisms for asking participants to perform a task or action (except to contribute draft text in some cases), or to contribute research or expertise on a subject. There are too few instances where citizens are encouraged to bring expertise or skills to the crowdlaw process.
Only two cases clearly welcomed academic research or evidence. Participants on Parlement & Citoyens may submit academic research, and the UK Parliament’s Evidence Checks explicitly call for evidence and research relevant to draft policies.
The only example of requesting an action from participants, Ley 3de3 tackled corruption by mobilizing over 200,000 Mexicans to ask representatives to make declarations about their assets, potential conflicts of interest, and taxes.
The goal should dictate “the ask”
If the goal is to obtain implementable proposals, do not ask merely for ideas. Ask, for example, for ideas supported by evidence (especially if such evidence will be needed to determine the viability of the proposal).
In the case of Peer to Patent, which was engagement by an administrative agency rather than the legislative branch, the United States Patent Office asked participants to supply information that would help a patent examiner determine whether an invention met the criteria for a patent. They did not, however, ask for people’s opinion about the patent, since that would have been legally irrelevant to the decisionmaking process.
3. Identify who will manage the process.
One finding that consistently emerged from our analysis of global cases was that moderating the discussion during engagement is crucially important. Poor moderation can quickly derail the process and leave participants confused and frustrated. Although peer-to-peer community moderation can help to distribute the work by inviting the public to moderate one another, such as by upvoting and downvoting and flagging contributions as spam or abusive. The plan must also include a professional team to respond and explain how input will be used. This is an important part of the bridge connecting the public and government participants.
Professional teams
Systems with dedicated professional teams better aggregate the content generated by users, especially to streamline participation for subsequent participants as a platform scales. Additionally, such teams can accelerate the rate of government response. (There exists experimentation with automating such management of online discussions.)
LabHacker/E-Democracia in Brazil uses 200 volunteer legislative consultants to serve as “technical translators” between citizens and representatives and ensure that input meets legal requirements.
Similarly, the process on Parlement & Citoyens is facilitated by volunteers. The same directive applies to offline engagement: Ireland’s We the Citizens public assemblies ran successful regional meetings in large part because of the role of skilled moderators.
Long-term viability
The multi-step process on Parlement & Citoyens is facilitated by volunteers, as is vTaiwan’s consultation process. Despite the success and reputation of these platforms, both face issues of sustainability and scalability given their dependence on volunteers. As of now, the most promising long-term model is institutionalization, both for the impact of the crowdlaw, and for the sustainability of the platform and process.
When user traffic started increasing on the Citizens Initiative platform in Finland, the platform was passed from the NGO who had run it up to that point (Avoin Ministeriö) to the Ministry of Justice. This enabled the platform to scale.
4. Plan for use, not only solicitation.
Public engagement without an institutional learning mechanism for taking outside contributions onboard and integrating them is frustrating for all involved. By analogy, government can open and publish its public procurement data, but such transparency does not in itself reduce corruption. Rather, public institutions have to learn how to use such data to change how they buy goods and services. Similarly, capacity must be built within legislatures to curate and use public input. This might require changes to the current processes by which legislation is proposed, drafted, negotiated, and implemented. As important as soliciting public input is, there must be a corresponding learning mechanism for redesigning how the parliament operates to make beneficial use of engagement.
Plan for use
On Irekia, the Basque region’s engagement portal, there is no standardized point at which a citizen proposal merits institutional response, nor is there a threshold to indicate whether a proposal is viable. This does more than create ambiguity around exactly what it takes for an institution to engage with a proposal — if there is no plan for how to utilize citizen input to impact the community, it risks the platform being more ornamental than impactful.
Impact analyses
To ensure that participation has an impact on the quality or impact of a law or policy, that impact must be measured in some way. To our knowledge, none of the cases examined have built-in evaluation processes, although some are openly tracking and releasing metadata about the process (e.g., Legislation Lab’s user statistics).
Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) is one of many frameworks for assessing the impact of regulation and a useful tool for evidence-based policy-making.¹ Practices like RIA can inform the design of impactful crowdlaw initiatives, shedding light on the effects of (1) the solicitation of bringing the public participation, and (2) the laws resulting from crowdlaw processes. The UK provides agencies with an impact assessment toolkit, and RIA is the first step of the Canadian regulatory development process.² Key is the adoption and implementation of evidence-based practices, whether they be a regulatory impact analysis or some other form of evaluation.
Increase the supply of public participants and information
5. Focus on incentives. Ask: “why should a member of the public participate?” and get the answer by talking to and surveying potential users.
Crowdsourcing literature indicates that perceived meaningfulness and fairness are critical to the quality of contributions and the viability of crowdsourcing platforms. The onus is on managers not only to design a process that can have meaningful impact on government, but to articulate for the public their potential for impact, while making it easy for them to do so. In other words, make the rationale for participation explicit and “sell” the reasons to participate through both good design and clear explanation.
Ease of use
Processes that orient their users lower the barriers to participation while informing participants about how and why they should be involved. A best-in-class communication strategy, explaining how and why to participate, can overcome public reluctance to join the project.
In South Africa, the newly established post-apartheid government explicitly mandated an inclusive constitution-drafting process (CAPP). Three months into the campaign to redraft its constitution, agencies conducted surveys to assess which areas needed more attention, resulting in a Constitutional Education Programme. For many South Africans, “it was the first time they were able to interact directly with their elected representatives. It elicited nearly 1.7 million submissions […] and meetings reach[ed] approximately 95,000 people.”
Conducting surveys, as the City of Madrid does, can identify problem areas. A survey of 482 users who had not registered for Decide Madrid found that 11% said participation was pointless, and 27% said they lacked of time to participate — the most common reason cited for non-participation. Any platform and process should be easy to use. If an individual cannot quickly engage on a platform, it will be very difficult to overcome that reluctance through other incentives.
Inform citizens’ decision to participate
Our research suggests that a clear plan and purpose for the process can at least allow participants to make the value judgement whether to participate or not. The public needs to be given sufficient information to decide whether participating is worth their time (hopefully it is). This may seem intuitive, but many platforms were not able to communicate the plan, purpose, or pipeline for participation.
Identify and use effective incentives
CrowdLaw literature, as well as research in public participation and crowd science, is beginning to rigorously explore incentives for participation. To start, three promising incentives to promote participation are:
- Making a contribution the participant finds meaningful: Research indicates that meaningful work can incentivize participation. One study that asked 271 subjects to label tumor cells. 115 subjects ultimately participated. One group was given the context for the labeling task — to help cancer researchers — while the other was given no context. The study confirmed that providing context to users for their task made it more meaningful, and induced more participants to complete the task. (The quality of the work performed was not affected for either group.)³
- Feeling a sense of belonging to a community: studies of three crowdsourcing platforms found that “community building is essential to sustain crowdsourcing platforms because participants contribute when they see themselves as community members and feel a sense of belonging through their meaningful contribution.”⁴
- Fairness as a consideration when participating: Franke, Keinz, and Klausberger found across two crowdsourcing simulations that “[i]t is still clear that individuals do not base their decision to participate in crowdsourcing solely on self-interest expectations; they also consider the fairness (or unfairness) of the system.”⁵
On the other hand, in Portugal, participants’ perception that their voices or opinions were heard by government representatives was not found to be a driver of participation. The study of 260 Portuguese subjects found “no statistically significant association between political participation and the study participant’s perception that government representatives heard (p = 0.769) or considered (p = 0.810) their opinions.”⁶
Further research should be done on the influence of a binding crowdlaw process versus a non-binding one as an incentive to participate. If citizens know their contribution will result in government response or action, participation may be more meaningful and impactful. On Decide Madrid, the section where users can make proposals is much more popular than the discussion section because proposals are binding and have the potential to create change, whereas discussions are simply fora for (non-binding) discussion.
6. Explain clearly how to participate.
The legislative process is complex, with many more bills proposed than ever become law. Therefore, a successful public engagement must explain the process and what is being asked of the participant, including setting out thresholds for action, such as the number of signatures required or what it takes for a comment to be considered. Crowdsourcing literature indicates that when “average participants” are “asked to perform technical tasks with specific instructions and detailed job classifications, their performance is equal to or better than the performance of experts.”
Targeted guidance
Provide information that helps participants understand how to participate, and to understand how that participation relates to government action (or inaction). They should understand how to use the platform, and understand the mechanics of the process. This will make the crowdlaw initiative more accessible, keep citizens from being disillusioned with or misled by the process, and make participants lives easier.
In the annual “Help Cut Red Tape” reports of British Columbia’s GovTogetherBC, the government clearly details popular ideas for streamlining government, statistics about the participation process, and ideas submitted along with the government action taken on the issue.
Lisbon Participatory Budgeting process drove votes from 2,800 in 2008 to 29,000 in 2012 by increasing the presence and clarity of the process, such as adding a feature allowing citizens to track the state of implementation of successful proposals, setting up mobile participation booths, and even touring the city with a “Participatory Budgeting Bus.”
Prep the public to participate
When asked about challenges to citizen engagement in the legislative process, parliamentarians repeatedly worried that citizens would not understand the issues at hand nor the legislative mechanisms to address them.⁷ For instance, one parliamentarian stated that if they could not get their head around complexities in the budgeting process, how could the public understand them to the point where they could contribute?⁸ While it may not be necessary for a citizen to understand every intricacy, priming them to engage on an issue in an informed way benefits all. Overall, crowdlaw can do a better job of quickly and effectively priming citizens to engage, whether by generating excitement, quickly getting them up to date on an issue, or making real legislative mechanisms more comprehensible.
Building engaging and effective civic education into the process is resource intensive, but research shows that it is worthwhile. As Bryer and Cooper note, “Low-quality participation may be attributable not to (or not only to) the capacities and ability of the citizen but to the design and implementation of the process itself.”⁹
Aragon Participa, the Spanish region’s engagement platform, has a 3-phase process for consultations that begins with an initial information phase that educates citizens about the issue at hand in the consultation. This prepare citizens to partake in the debate and proposal phase, as well as the return phase in which they are told the outcome of the process.
Citizen Assemblies on Brexit, held in the UK, will invite citizens to two public deliberations, and will provide experts and campaigners from both sides of the debate on contentious issues to help them better deliberate.¹⁰
7. Respect privacy and authenticate users when needed
Although it is technically possible to certify residency or identity, decide whether and when such hurdles are necessary. For example, if the goal is to get the best ideas to solve a problem, does it matter where they come from? In order to direct opportunities to participate to people based on their interests, a voluntary request for information might be welcome where involuntary data collection on people’s preferences may not.
Anonymity and quality
Empirical evidence suggests that “the decision regarding identification or anonymity has to be balanced between discussion quality and quantity. Although anonymity is able to increase the quantity of participation, it simultaneously lowers the quality of the content.” Citizen status is particularly relevant in driving participation when the output of a system is binding on government (e.g. if a crowdlaw process resembles voting or a referenda more so than a non-binding suggestion box for ideas).¹¹
Binding processes call for more authentication
Some platforms use a tiered authentication system based on the nature of the participation (e.g., browsing proposals on the platform versus voting on a proposal with guaranteed government action).
Because Reykjavik’s City Council is obliged to consider the most popular proposals on Better Reykjavik, participants are authenticated using an electronic ID or password delivered through the citizen’s online bank to ensure one-citizen-one-vote.¹²
Tiered authentication can set the actions a Decide Madrid that a user can perform.
1. Unregistered users may browse site content.
2. Basic verified users — verified through residence data and a mobile phone number — can post in discussions as well as create and support proposals.
3. Completely verified users — verified in-person or via mail — can do all of those actions plus vote on proposals.
User privacy and protection
Participants in a crowdlaw initiative should be able to securely transmit any and all information, be it personal data or a vote on a proposal, which blockchain can facilitate.¹³ Governments are beginning to experiment with secure blockchain technologies in order to protect public information.¹⁴ The Swedish, Estonian, Ukrainian, and Georgian governments are integrating blockchain into their land registry systems.¹⁵
8. Communicate the outcome of final decisions.
Public officials should respond to contributions and endeavor to communicate regularly about outcomes. Even if the public is invited only to participate in making proposals at the outset, create a mechanism to share final outcomes.
Triggering feedback
A public engagement system should be as responsive as possible. Junctures where feedback makes sense are starting to emerge from the case studies. Researchers highlight the importance of keeping users informed throughout the process regarding how their inputs are being utilized. They also urge prompt publication of results following the participatory process.¹⁶
Parlement & Citoyens publishes a final report at the conclusion of a consultation. By receiving a review of the process’s outcome and implications, participants can understand how the process will move forward, as well as when and how their feedback was used.
Although no longer operational, ePart stressed the importance of closing the process loop. The platform, which allowed users to submit comments and concerns on committee hearings topics about to reach the Knesset, reported back on the outcomes of hearing discussions, linking outcomes to specific user comments or trending hashtags where applicable. (See Appendix I for more information.)
Transparent practices
Participants of vTaiwan engage in on-going deliberations with each other and with representatives of relevant government ministries. Participants know that if consensus is reached, the Taiwanese government must either adopt the idea or provide a response why the idea is not feasible. GovTogetherBC publishes the results of every engagement. On the other hand, the Irekia system in Spain’s Basque region lacks thresholds specifying when citizens’ proposals receive a government response or are deemed actionable, creating ambiguity around what it takes for government to actually engage with a citizen proposal.
9. Diversify engagement opportunities and diversify who participates.
Empirical research suggests that participation opportunities may be failing to attract diverse participation. Ensuring participation by diverse members of the public is hard work, including investment in campaigns to recruit and give voice to the voiceless.
Diverse participation requires explicit action
Podemos’s draft law outlines specific opportunities for groups to participate in lawmaking on issues of special significance (e.g., targeting specific economic, social, environmental, cultural, gender, or territorial issues). This is critical to bringing underrepresented populations into the process. Few systems we examined took active steps to target populations; the homogeneity in participants affirms that active steps are likely required.
Diversity is a common, but not insurmountable, challenge
Empirical research reflects the difficulty in attracting a broad range of the population. This is a particular concern given the broad nature of the processes reviewed; if a crowdlaw process aims to consult the expert public on a topic, it is intuitive that participants will be more homogenous. However, issues in representation in these general participation opportunities signal systemic issues for attracting diverse participants. The goal is typically to match the demographics of the participants with those of the affected jurisdiction, or to boost participation from marginalized groups.
Citizen councils that consult with the local junta in Montevideo’s participatory decentralization program are, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly comprised of junta supporters, and lacking representation from the poor and uneducated.¹⁷ A survey of 4,500 participants on Parlement & Citoyens showed that 77% were male, 82% had received higher education, and 25–34 was the most represented age group.
On the other hand, Better Reykjavik sees a well-distributed age profile among ~16,000 participants (50% are 36–55, 30% are 16–35, and 20% are older than 56). This may be a result of Iceland’s high technology adoption. Participant is biased towards university educated and with higher salaries. Other detailed demographics are unavailable.
Online versus offline
8 of the 26 case studies offered both online and offline engagement opportunities.
Madame Mayor, I have an Idea, the Parisian participatory budgeting program, is increasingly seeing users vote offline rather than online. In the first round of voting in 2014, 60% of people voted online. By 2016, less than one-third of votes were cast electronically (suggesting a shift in who participated, as well). This is credited to “a huge number of offline workshops, groups and civil society-led activity which galvanises participation at a local level.”¹⁸
Better Reykjavik provides an example of running a platform when there is no digital gap: 70% of the population owns a mobile device and 93.5% of the population uses the Internet.¹⁹ This simplifies user tracking and the communications strategy (all through social media and online). In a highly technically connected population, creating an accessible platform has different issues from the same goal in communities with lower rates of technology adoption.²⁰
In addition to an web portal that allows the public to submit proposals, participate in dialogue, and engage in participatory budgeting activities, the creators of Decide Madrid established 26 Citizen Service Offices. These offices are dispersed throughout the city and allow residents the opportunity to voice their opinions in person, if they so choose, in addition to engaging online.
Communication and outreach strategies
Programs sometimes implement wide-reaching communication strategies that can help increase awareness of, and participation on, a crowdlaw platform.
The redrafting of the South African Constitution included an extensive communication strategy that distributed four million copies of the draft constitution in the drafting phase, and seven million copies of the final document, including illustrated guides for non-literate portions of the population. (An early survey of areas disconnected from the redrafting campaign helped to find areas that needed such communiqués).
Outreach and trust
Experiences and randomized-control trials demonstrate that the most effective way to engage with marginalized individuals and communities is to reach out to them through organizations already working with them. J-PAL has found that if the organization deploying a new tool or platform is not well-known or trusted by the community, it is not likely to succeed. Instead, partner with a local NGO or trusted community leader to deploy the program.²¹
Experiment and improve
10. Test what works and iterate.
CrowdLaw is a new phenomenon. In order to accelerate adoption, more research is needed, necessitating that practitioners and researchers collaborate to design experiments. Research can involving natural experiments to observe how the platform works, who participates, and how. Simple analytical software can generate data that platform owners and others can use to study a crowdlaw initiative. Always ensure that such administrative data is open and available. In addition, consider running simple controlled trials by dividing participants into two groups and presenting them with alternative experiences.
A/B testing
A/B testing can be used by managers of the crowdlaw initiative to try different ways, for example, of explaining how to participate or of testing participation’s relevance at different points in the legislative process. Surveying participants provides information to develop an effective platform and process.
Quantifying changes
As noted above, Lisbon successfully increased participation in their participatory budgeting program more than tenfold thanks to a few strategic adjustments. Voting jumped from approximately 2,800 votes in 2008 to over 29,000 votes in 2012 on account of lowering barriers to participation and widely advertising the program, including by setting up mobile participation booths and touring the city with a “Participatory Budgeting Bus.”
Iteration informed by data
The Legislation Lab, which runs a platform for collaborating on legislative texts, openly published statistics on participation in the process. The platform is still in development, but this feature is promising for understanding the contours of who is participating and generating the ideas on the system. It provides empirical information that can inform the design of the system. For instance, if the statistics turn up disparities in participation by gender, socioeconomic factors, or locality, they can inform concerted efforts to (a) bring excluded users into the process, and/or (b) ensure the process better caters to those users in subsequent iterations. Decide Madrid also makes such participation summary statistics readily available.²²
- Gabriella Capone and Beth Noveck
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Or go to the first post in the series and table of contents here.
Footnotes:
¹ “Regulatory Impact Analysis,” OECD, 2016, accessed June 26, 2017, available at http://www.oecd.org/gov/regulatory-policy/ria.htm
² “Guide to the Federal Regulatory Development Process,” Government of Canada, April 17, 2014, accessed June 26, 2017, available at https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-secretariat/services/federal-regulatory-management/guidelines-tools/guide-federal-regulatory-development-process.html#t33
³ Dana Chandler and Adam Kapelner, “Breaking Monotony with Meaning: Motivation in Crowdsourcing Markets,” (Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2013, 90): 123–33.
⁴ Helen K. Liu, “Crowdsourcing Government from Multiple Disciplines,” (Theory to Practice, 2017): 7. See also:
Simone Ashby, Julian Hanna, Ian Oakley, Tatiana Vieira, Filipe Abreu and Pedro Campos, “Citizen X: Designing for Holistic Community Engagement,” Paper presented at the 11th Biannual Conference of the Italian Chapter of SIGCHI, Rome, September 2015: 28–30.
Lisa Schmidthuber and Dennis Hilgers, “Unleashing Innovation beyond Organizational Boundaries: Exploring Citizensourcing Projects,” (International Journal of Public Administration, 2017).
David Askay, “A Conceptual Framework for Investigating Organizational Control and Resistance in Crowd-Based Platforms,” Paper presented at the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, January 4–7.
⁵ Nikolaus Franke, Peter Keinz and Katharina Klausberger, “Does This Sound Like a Fair Deal? Antecedents and Consequences of Fairness Expectations in the Individual’s Decision to Participate in Firm Innovation,” (Organization Science, 2013, 24:5): 1500.
⁶ Vanda Carreira, João Reis Machado and Lia Vasconcelos, “Engaging Citizen Participation — A Result of Trusting Governmental Institutions and Politicians in the Portuguese Democracy” (Social Studies, 2016, 5:40): 3.
⁷ ParlAmericas Takeaways — see Appendix II.
⁸ Conversation with a delegation at the ParlAmericas conference. In Lisbon, citizens themselves recognize this potential issue. Citizens report dissatisfaction with the number of low quality proposals, the unguided online discussion, and perceived lack of transparency and feedback on rejected proposals. This specific feedback can be directly addressed through teaching.
⁹ Thomas A. Bryer and Terry L. Cooper, “H. George Frederickson and the Dialogue on Citizenship in Public Administration” (Public Administration Review, 2012, 72): S111.
¹⁰ Sarah Allan, “The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit: Public to debate UK’s exit terms,” Involve, July 12, 2017, accessed July 25, 2017, http://www.involve.org.uk/2017/07/12/citizens-assembly-brexit-public-debate-uks-exit-terms/?utm_source=Involve+Newsletter&utm_campaign=44d3d31560-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_07_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_712261e4e1-44d3d31560-6266&mc_cid=44d3d31560&mc_eid=9472823414
¹¹ Friess and Eilders, “A Systematic Review of Online Deliberation Research,” 326.
¹² Elettra Bianchi Dennerlein and Francesca Bria, “Pilots in Iceland: boosting bottom-up municipal democracy,” Nesta Blogs, December 19, 2014, accessed July 17, 2017: http://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/pilots-iceland-boosting-bottom-municipal-democracy
¹³ For introductory blockchain resources see:
Dan Tapscott and Alex Apscott, Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World, (Penguin Group, 2016).
Steve Cheng, Matthias Daub, Axel Domeyer, and Martin Lundqvist, “Using blockchain to improve data management in the public sector,” Digital McKinsey Insights, February 2016, accessed June 25, 2017, http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/using-blockchain-to-improve-data-management-in-the-public-sector?cid=eml-web.
“How blockchains could change the world,” Digital McKinsey Insights, May 2016, accessed June 25, 2017, http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/how-blockchains-could-change-the-world.
¹⁴ E.g. Alison DeNisco, “Why blockchain could be your next form of ID as a world citizen,” TechRepublic, June 20, 2017, accessed on June 25, 2017, available at http://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-blockchain-could-be-your-next-form-of-id-as-a-world-citizen/
¹⁵ Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, “Ukraine launches big blockchain deal with tech firm Bitfury,” Reuters, April 19, 2017, accessed June 26, 2017, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-bitfury-blockchain-idUSKBN17F0N2
¹⁶ OECD, Promises and Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of Online Citizen Engagement.
¹⁷ “Participatory Decentralization in Montevideo,” Participedia, accessed July 26, 2017, available at http://participedia.net/en/cases/participatory-decentralization-montevideo#[6]
¹⁸ Julie Simon, Theo Bass, Victoria Boelman, and Geoff Mulgan, “Digital Democracy: The tools transforming political engagement,” Nesta, February 2017, accessed June 26, 2017, available at http://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/files/digital_democracy.pdf
¹⁹ Laura M. Steckman, Marilyn J. Andrews, Online around the World: A Geographic Encyclopedia of the Internet, Social Media, and Mobile Apps, (ABC-CLIO, 2017): 93–94.
²⁰ “Smarter Crowdsourcing against Corruption — Session 3: Citizen Engagement,” The Governance Lab, June 27, 2017.
²¹ Discussions with J-PAL and timby.org as part of “Smarter Crowdsourcing against Corruption — Session 3: Citizen Engagement,” The Governance Lab, June 27, 2017.
²² Making this information available to users may also enable them to take action on — or generate solutions to — problems with the crowdsourcing process itself!
